On Sun, May 4, 2014 at 10:16 PM, Timothy Collinson <timothy.collinson@port.ac.uk> wrote:
I've just been having a look at them as I tried to design my own rules to accomplish what you wanted.  Having had a reasonable stab at it I decided they were about as inelegant as an inelegant thing could be.

So I looked up WBH rules to see what they'd done.   Here they are:


Thanks!

<SNIP>
 
I like the simplicity of this - although it doesn't quite do what you want it to WRT to GOV and LAW being affected by one another (or TL for that matter).

I like that it says 'major' powers so you always have the option of lots of minor ones if you wish.

Not so fond of it only allowing 1D-1 powers as it would be harder to replicate Earth's 200+ (although obviously a huge number would be minor).
 
That can't reproduce the G7+India and China. Assuming we count all the G7s as "major" even though the population of some is below 2% of the planet's. Of course, we don't want to get picky on that, since the US is below 5% and Russia makes 2% by the skin of its teeth.


My scheme didn't have '7' as a GOV type rerolled but in effect further subdivided that country so that lots of minor countries were possible.

I also note they bypass the whole 'apportion the pop between countries' by just making a referee decision about it.

Yes, that is a tad unsatisfactory. I ahev a couple of ideas for that, but they still need some thought.

Having had a play with this, I would either use WBH as is for balkanized worlds, or just design each one by hand for whatever effect I wanted to achieve.  Unless someone can come up with something a lot more elegant than my poor effort!


I can see the WBH rules as a quick & dirty way to flesh out worlds, subject to referee adjustment. As you say, however, they don't quite do the job I had in mind.

I've been toying with more detailed rules myself, which I hope to complete in <checks conference calendar> a few weeks. It is hard to strike a balance between realism and simplicity, but I have some ideas.

My initial thoughts is that the rules need to have three parts, because they are interrelated. The one I started with needs to come last.

1. What the UWP of a balkanized world actually means (meaning above all TL and Law level).
2. How to generate balkanized worlds from scratch (no given UWP).
3. How to flesh out existing UWPs with gov code 7.

Regarding the first point, the more I think about it, the less I like (IMTU, YMMV, usual disclaimer applies) the interpretation of Law and Tech being "what the traveller encounters around the starport." First, my games are rarely confined to what is around the starport, so there is little to gain in practical terms there. Second, if the UWPs are collected by an imperial statistical office within the ISS or equivalent organism, the Imperium is goign to want them to mean something, i.e. to be *Representative* of what actually goes on in the world. A world with 500 millions of unruly warring primitives and a 50,000 inhabitants hi-tech Hortalez-et-cie mining colony with a C starport should not be listed as Gov 6, Law 8, TL B. Besides, with that convention UWPs would not be very useful for getting quick estimates of population fractions at a given TL at, say, the subsector level.

However, the more I think about it, the less I like with the first alternative I mentioned, i.e. TL and Law Gov as population-weighted averages of the individual countries. Averages are statistically unstable, a few outliers and they are skewed.  Besides, averages will be fractional numbers needing rounding, which is ugly. A 10 million inhabitants, TL 3 country and a 1 million, TL 13 one yield an average of TL 3.9, rounded up to 4. But nobody in the planet lives at TL 4, so in what way is that representative? And if the average is close to n.5, minor population changes might result in the TL going up and down every few years.

I am leaning towards a new (?) interpretation of Law and TL codes: the ***median*** of what is encountered in the planet. The median would always be an integer, is less shaky than the average (requiring less adjustments over the years---the ISS would love that) and the interpretation is straightforward: at least half the population has that tech/law level or better, and at least half has that tech/law level or worse. OK, theoretically you could have a perfect tie, with two medians (very, very unlikely, but possible, so let's say the ISS uses the upper median). This reinterpretation would probably only be relevant for balkanized planets (as intended), since a single government would typically result in relatively homogeneous TL and law level.

Another advantage (thinking of parts 2 and 3 above) is that in any planet where a single country encompasses 51% or more of the population, the planetary law and TL are trivial to compute: they are identical to those of the main country. That's not true for averages or for the around-the-starport rule.

Thoughts, anybody? I am getting quite interested on this, so I suspect I will eventually come up with a bunch of home rules... hm, do we have "Rule grabs" in the list?

Carlos Alos-Ferrer
Professor of Economics, University of Cologne
http://www.decisions.uni-koeln.de